Document Federations with Data Sovereignty and Residency

One of the questions we are often asked is, “Wouldn’t a company just migrate content?” It seems a straight forward issue. If an organization has various enterprise content management (ECM) and document management systems (DMS) platforms, wouldn’t it just make sense to migrate content off lesser used legacy repositories. Sometimes this is not possible. International organizations must deal with Data Sovereignty and Residency, a requirement by certain governments to maintain Personal Identifiable Information (PII) in repositories within its geographic boundaries for that country’s citizens.

Legislation like European Union’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), Canadian PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act), and Australian Privacy Principles (APP) are creating requirements for organizations to keep certain information of the jurisdiction’s citizens in repositories within the country boundaries. These laws typically focus on PII and require that data and documents be digitally stored in country. Maintaining compliance with these laws can be difficult, especially when few vendors support the ability to work across their own content silos. Addressing compliance may also require a mix of different vendors as cloud data centers may not offer storage in all of the necessary geographies.

Using a federation of document and content repositories organizations can meet the requirements for content sovereignty and residency. Content can be stored and accessed in country through the repository of choice. Simflofy content federation technologies can make those documents in country specific silos accessible and editable through other repositories around the globe. Simflofy can even create a federation of repositories for a single vendor that does not support federations themselves. This will allow you to keep Canadian, Australian, and German PII documents in country.

Simflofy includes audit capabilities that will record when a document has been viewed through the framework. This can be used to ensure the documents are used across geographies appropriately. PII filters can be added that will stop content that includes PII from being shown outside a particular geography. That way when a U.S. search includes PII content from France, the system can warn the user of potential compliance issues before sending the content out.